


Saddled

by HarveyWallbanger



Category: Gotham (TV)
Genre: An exploration of what it is to live with guilt, Experimental Style, Gen, M/M, Public Sex, Shifting view point, Spanking, but just experimental enough to be irritating, discussion of suicide, disguised as a simple story about one man spanking another
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-05
Updated: 2016-03-05
Packaged: 2018-05-24 19:56:53
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,736
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6164884
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HarveyWallbanger/pseuds/HarveyWallbanger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You know what you've come here looking for.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Saddled

**Author's Note:**

> I wouldn't have written this story without the premise provided by MillicentCordelia. Thank you.  
> I am not involved in the production of Gotham, and this school is not involved in the production of Gotham. No one pays me to do this. Do not try any of this at home. Thank you, and good night.

What did you come here looking for?  
That, I do not know. But not this.  
That's what you'd say.  
But you-  
You're asleep. You're walking in your sleep, dragging your body, as though it were a burden somehow separate from you, through air that sits as ponderously on your flesh as your flesh sits on this earth, and this earth sits in space. You should feel light. You've been judged, and found to be without sin.  
They just aren't looking hard enough. Your lies are a tissue of absurdity. That the slightest argument would rupture. All of your life, past and present and future- all that you are- rests on the head of one fragile man. Not fragile enough, though. Not fragile in the right way to help you.  
You're beginning to think that it would take the hand of God, Himself, to dislodge Oswald from this mortal coil. Nothing less than a miracle to kill him. To shatter the shell of life that you once couldn't bear to crack. You'd be better off now if you had. If you'd taken your medicine when you were told to. Think of all of the trouble you'd have saved yourself. Now, you go to bed praying to anyone or anything that might be listening, that Oswald Cobblepot die in Arkham. That he have a fight with another inmate and lose. Badly. That he receive an accidental overdose of medication, and swallow his tongue or simply stop breathing. That the full weight of everything he's lived through catch up with and crush him, so that he can move no further forward. Let him cut his wrists with a scalpel in the infirmary. Or let him take some pills. Or let him find his way up to the roof, and jump. Taking all of your sins with him. Converting to truth the falsehoods that you drag wretchedly behind you. With no one left alive to say anything to the contrary, you'd truly be without sin. Until that happens, though, the truth about you rests within Oswald, who is always waiting, it seems, like an over-filled glass, to spill.  
Though, he's sure, other people have put it together. Leslie must simply be biding her time. She'll have realized how impossible it would be to raise a child with Jim. When she's able to think more clearly, she'll come up with a plan, and she'll leave. Harvey has to know. He's so deep in the mire that he'd recognize a fellow inmate. With creeping inevitability, it must be slowly becoming obvious to just about everyone. Edward Nygma always has a sour look for Jim, now; like he saw Jim do something outlandishly and inexcusably loathsome, but knows he couldn't convince others of this, and must content himself with private disapproval. Barnes-  
Barnes knows. Really knows. He as good as told Jim. And Jim  
likes that he knows.  
It's a comfort. To be seen as he truly is. Even if it's by someone who wants to put him away. Walk him through the station like any other criminal. Deposit him in the holding cell. Give him a phone call, and wait for his lawyer. Testify against him in court. Sometimes, being punished like that, with all of the attendant hatred and anger, is a small price to pay for having no secrets from someone.  
We have to test it. Only, it isn't a test if we already know what's going to happen.  
And you do know. In that way that's beyond your mind or even your heart. The knowledge is in your bones. If it's that far inside, you have no hope of extricating it. You just have to follow it where it takes you.  
Barnes is a hard surface to come up against. He says, “I don't play games, Gordon. Tell me what you came here for, or get the hell out of my office.”  
Jim swallows. “I want you to tell me what you know. About me.”  
Barnes narrows his eyes. “Know, or can prove?”  
“What you know.”  
Barnes sighs. “I know that you're in deep with Cobblepot. That there's way more to the story about the two of you than anybody knows. I think that if you didn't kill Galavan, yourself, you're helping Cobblepot cover up what actually did happen. I don't know what's worse, you having done it and letting him take the hit for you, or you conspiring with him to obstruct justice. What do you think, Gordon? Is it worse to be a killer, or in bed with one? So tied up with him that it no longer matters who did what, because whatever happens to him, happens to you.”  
“I don't know,” Jim says quietly.  
“Yeah. It's a tough question.”  
“What do you want to do about it?”  
“What do I want to do about it? Make a case, and charge you. What the hell do you think I want to do about it?”  
It's then that Jim notices that he's breathing heavily. And that sort of gives it away, doesn't it?  
Barnes regards him quizzically, eyes narrowing almost into dashes as he tries to find his angle. “You mean, what do I want to do to you.”  
“Yes.”  
“If you want to blackmail me, you're going to have to try harder. Your approach is a little heavy-handed.”  
That's something. Getting told about subtlety by Nathaniel Barnes. “It's not a trick,” Jim says defiantly, “I want to know.”  
“I should fire you right now, is what I should do,” Barnes muses, “for insubordination. For goddamn sexual harassment,” he laughs.  
“Do it.”  
“You want to get hurt that badly? All right. I'll hurt you. Hands on the desk.”  
No. You need to leave. This is all wrong. There might not seem to be a way out of this, but there is. There has to be. You have a shock, but instead of taking you away, it brings you back to yourself.  
Jim's going to go home. Call a lawyer. Talk seriously with Leslie about getting out of this place. He's going to trade his testimony against Cobblepot for immunity from prosecution for Galavan's murder. Cobblepot shouldn't be doing time for this, and he shouldn't be doing it in a place like Arkham, but he needs to be put away. He's a dangerous man. Ogden Barker's yesterday's news, and no one cared, even then; if Cobblepot wants to try to hurt Jim that way, let him. Jim will make another deal. He knows things about Cobblepot that no one else knows. Getting out of this will be easy.  
But this isn't the way out.  
He has his hands on the desk, weight pushed forward onto them. He's completely still as Barnes undoes his pants, pulls them down, pushes his shirt up in back. Only when Barnes' hand hits flesh does Jim inhale audibly.  
A second later, he exhales, mouth a rubbery 'O'. “What?” he whispers.  
“You came here to get punished, didn't you? You don't have the balls to take what's really coming to you, so this will have to do.”  
Barnes hits him again. That unmistakable clap fills the office. You have to have heard it. Everyone in the station has to have heard that. You're going to follow the sound, open the door, find them like this. Barnes smacking Jim's bare ass with an open hand. Jim half naked, half hard. God knows what his face looks like.  
“The real thing wouldn't be as much fun, would it?” Barnes continues, “It's something you'd have to live with, everyday.” Another blow comes, pushing the breath out of Jim. “Like this, you think: I'll take my lumps, and go on, like nothing happened. That's the way it works in this rotten place. Every day, another honest cop gets asked to do something they know is wrong, and they do it, and the sky doesn't fall. Just because nothing happens to you, Jim, doesn't mean that what you did wasn't wrong.”  
Jim tries to speak, but all that comes out of his mouth is an animal sound, from down in his guts. “I know,” he says, finally, his voice congested with need.  
“So, admit it.”  
“Admit what?” Your heart is racing.  
You want to be known. You need it. But not so much. Not all at once. Not everything.  
“Admit that you did something wrong. You don't have to tell me what it was, exactly. Just admit it, and you'll feel better. Because I'll make you feel better.”  
“I did something I shouldn't have done,” Jim says, letting his head fall forward. A drop of sweat falls from his face onto a sheet of paper on Barnes' desk. Jim watches the stain spread.  
“Why shouldn't you have done it?”  
“It was wrong.”  
Barnes hits him again. The pain is bright, sizzling, lighting up his vision and his breath and his blood. God. “I knew it was wrong,” Jim says, hoping for more contact, “but I couldn't stop.”  
“Why couldn't you stop?”  
“I don't know.”  
Even though his answer can't be satisfactory, Barnes hits him again, anyway. He can't prevent himself from moaning. “If I stopped, I'd have to think about why I stopped, what I'd been doing. If I kept going, I never had to ask the question. I like not knowing.”  
“But you know enough to know that it's wrong.”  
“Yes.”  
Now, Barnes his hand between Jim's legs, pulling him off in long, punishing strokes. It takes less than a minute for him to come. Immediately afterwards, Jim becomes aware of the absurdity and horror of his situation. But that's his whole world, in miniature.  
When he's standing up straight, he ventures a hand on Barnes' hip, and he's met with an expression of amused skepticism. “You're the one who came in here needing something; not me. You got it, so you can get yourself together, and leave.”  
It's worse than punishment, and it's worse than no punishment, at all. Being dismissed is like not existing.  
Barnes is right. Everyday, people do things that they know are wrong. Sometimes, it's because they don't have any choice. Sometimes, it's because they want to. Sometimes, they just do them, and don't know why. We keep doing them because we have to. You don't know why, but you have to.  
The sky doesn't fall. It stays in place. And beneath it, all the world continues. We do what we've always done.


End file.
